Sapphire Radeon HD 5750

If you primarily play games on a console, your choices for quality racing games are plenty. On the PC, that’s not so much the case. While there are a good number, there aren’t enough for a given type of racing game, from sim, to arcade. So when Race Driver: GRID first saw its release, many gamers were excited, and for good reason. It’s not a sim in the truest sense of the word, but it’s certainly not arcade, either. It’s somewhere in between.

The game happens to be great fun, though, and similar to console games like Project Gotham Racing, you need a lot of skill to succeed at the game’s default difficulty level. And like most great racing games, GRID happens to look absolutely stellar, and each of the game’s locations look very similar to their real-world counterparts. All in all, no racing fan should ignore this one.

Manual Run-through: For our testing here, we choose the city where both Snoop Dogg and Sublime hit their fame, the LBC, also known as Long Beach City. We choose this level because it’s not overly difficult, and also because it’s simply nice to look at. Our run consists of an entire 2-lap race, with the cars behind us for almost the entire race.

Like our Crysis Warhead results, I find the results above a bit strange. ATI excels in GRID, so to see the HD 5750 fall behind the GTS 250 is bizarre. Things changed at 2560×1600, but that makes the issue even stranger.

The GTS 250 might surpass the HD 5750 in performance in GRID, but both come out to about the same in the “best playable” arena, with both being just fine to stay at the games top settings with 4xAA.